I've made progress, with some guidance from Dave.
Last night I was temporarily online in the '
BBYW Pro' profile. This was much better than before
- I connected to the EA 'lobby' almost instantly, where there had been a 10 second delay
- Choosing and joining a game was just as fast
- Playing itself worked great also - when I connected, that is...
A few times I was accepted to join a game, the map was loaded but before I could begin I was kicked from the server. This happened 4 out of 5 tries. However, Dave has pointed to some blogs that report this as an EA problem rather than a PN one. Also, I may have to add some forwarding onto my router so that the Wii gets the data it needs.
Dave's going to add the EA lobby port to the network. Once EA sort their problem out *hopefully* I'll be 100% ready to play.
Regarding the EA problem and the port forwarding though - not exactly a plug and play experience! As simple as Wii gaming should be, it still suffers from a learning curve that I worry will be beyond some people.